Children of the Dictatorship

"This long-anticipated... publication signals the beginning of a potentially fruitful and certainly long overdue examination of the 1960s and 1970s in Greece. After so many years of discussions and debates on the Greek Civil War, the time for a careful consideration of the junta and its afterlife seems to have finally come. Kornetis offers an enormously productive entry point by exploring the issue that is analytically most central and socially most sensitive concerning this period: resistance and its counterpart, complicity. For anyone with an interest in the period or in the broad range of theoretical issues raised by its study, Children of the Dictatorship is an indispensible book that is sure to anchor future discussion and debate of the military regime." · Journal of Modern Greek Studies


"The book is a pioneer study in its field. Besides offering a rigorous historical reconstruction, it presents an excellent analysis of the relationship between institutional and contentious politics through different regimes and periods. The book offers a clear historical reconstruction and an innovative theoretical reflection. For this, it might be an interesting reading not only for experts - students, scholars, or journalists - but also for a more general public interested in such events." · Democratization


Putting Greece back on the cultural and political map of the "Long 1960s," this book traces the dissent and activism of anti-regime students during the dictatorship of the Colonels (1967-74). It explores the cultural as well as ideological protest of Greek student activists, illustrating how these "children of the dictatorship" managed to re-appropriate indigenous folk tradition for their "progressive" purposes and how their transnational exchange molded a particular local protest culture. It examines how the students' social and political practices became a major source of pressure on the Colonels' regime, finding its apogee in the three day Polytechnic uprising of November 1973 which laid the foundations for a total reshaping of Greek political culture in the following decades.


Kostis Kornetis is Assistant Professor at the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies at New York University. He received his PhD in History and Civilization from the European University Institute, Florence. From 2007 to 2012 he taught in the History Department at Brown University. His research focuses on the history and memory of the 1960s, the methodology of oral history, and the use of film as a source for social and cultural history.